A recent Wall Street Journal article dug into a common refrain of the men’s and boy’s movement (of which I am a proud member!): men’s mental health is worse than women’s and as such, men should seek out more talk therapy and this requires the recruitment of more male therapists.
I take issue with Pamela Paul’s What Will Happen When All the Male Therapists Are Gone?, as like every other discussion on this topic I’ve read, she suffers from a giant blind spot:
Therapy is treated as an unquestioned social good, despite evidence that it is most often only modestly effective and frequently leaves clients worse off.
It is absolutely true that rates of male suicide are growing and outpace that of women. This is an alarming issue that requires attention.
Paul is of course correct in that psychotherapy is grossly dominated by women — both clinicians and researchers. Yet despite its status in the zeitgeist as a silver bullet for nearly any form of emotional discomfort, there is growing evidence th…